Scottie's Tech.Info

A chimpanzee and two trainees could run her!

Category: Computers

A crash course in how the internet works

Way back in 1995, I was a freshman at university. I had this new thing called “The Internet” at my fingertips.

It was cool, but I wanted to know how it worked. I asked someone, and they wouldn’t answer the question – mostly because they couldn’t answer!

Today, everyone knows and uses the internet, but people keep asking me questions about the basic concepts that make it go.

So, I figured it was about time to give a basic intro to how the internet actually works, including a simplified discussion of networks, IP addresses, ports, protocols, DNS, bandwidth, latency, and more!

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How to Remove or Block Cookies in Chrome

I use Firefox as my main browser, which is why I wrote the earlier article Remove individual cookies in Firefox (yes, it changed again).

I also use Chrome as a secondary browser since I have 2 screens and too many tabs for one browser!

Recently, I had to do some testing for a web app. I needed to delete a cookie in Chrome…

Well, whattaya know?!

Unlike Firefox, Google Chrome makes it very easy to remove individual cookies. Plus, you can even block cookies for an entire domain!

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Surveillance Valley: What you need to know about the Internet

I recently finished reading the book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.

Now, I’ve known for awhile that the world of high-tech – and especially the internet – doesn’t quite work the way everyone thinks it does.

We worship tech billionaires as if they’re the Second Coming, praising them for their ingenuity and standing in awe of their sheer genius.

The reality, on the other hand, is a bit more mundane.

Pretty much all the big players in the internet/tech world got where they are with a little help. And by “a little help”,  I mean A LOT…

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How to turn off those annoying notification popups in your browser

Will you allow this site to send notifications?

NO! And stop asking me, dangit!

For ages now, I have put up with these silly popups. Then, one day very recently, I asked myself why.

Why was I putting up with them?!

In the absence of a good answer, I figured out how to turn them off. I’m guessing that if I never bothered to figure it out, you might not have, either.

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Episode 3: Reactivating Windows 10 after a major hardware upgrade (again)

A little over a month ago, I had the opportunity to upgrade a whole slew of Win 10 machines.

Back then, I wrote this article: Reactivating Windows 10 after a second major hardware upgrade

Now, I thought I had everything figured out in terms of re-activing Win 10 after a hardware upgrade.

However, it seems things have changed in even more ways than I thought.

SIGH (again)…

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Run cron jobs in Windows Subsystem for Linux

If you’re running Ubuntu or another linux shell in Windows 10 via WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), you’ve probably wondered about using cron.

Cron is super-handy for doing things, like, running a backup.

You see, as useful as WSL is, it stores all the linuxy files in a way that is not exactly easily backup-able by File History or anything else… as far as I can tell.

Worse yet, even when you try to set up a cron job to run a backup, it doesn’t work!

What to do, what to do?

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Reactivating Windows 10 after a second major hardware upgrade

I recently ran into a little problem: I upgraded a puter that had Windows 10 on it, and Win 10 refused to reactivate afterwards!

Now, you might have read my guide here: Upgrade your motherboard without reinstalling Windows 10

Well, it works.

But… It appears there is a limit to the number of times you can upgrade the hardware in your puter before M$ will insist on a call to their beloved Tech Support line.

SIGH…

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